There are great and disturbing similarities between the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus and the Soviet Union’s handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In both cases, communist regimes waited too long to admit they had a problem, placing the illusion of government control and stability ahead of the preservation of human life. This caused the risks and the number of deaths to grow unnecessarily.
In both cases, the lack of transparency increased the risk to the entire world.
In both cases, the senior leadership hid from taking responsibility. In the Soviet Union, the culpability of high-ranking officials was covered up by the scapegoating lower-level functionaries. The same is likely to occur in China.
We’ve already gained very telling insights into China’s mishandling of the crisis. Authorities in Wuhan first downplayed the crisis to their citizens, then deleted from the record their own underestimation of the problem.
We know that when Wuhan province Dr. Li Wenliang warned that the coronavirus was spreading more quickly than commonly admitted, he was arrested for “making false comments on the Internet.” Wenliang died this month after contracting the virus from a patient.
We know that the Chinese central government is now engaged in an all-encompassing effort to censor reporting on the nature, scale, and inadequacy of its response to the outbreak.
We know that, like Mikhail Gorbachev, Xi Jinping has distanced himself from the virus. He still has not visited Wuhan, preferring to declare a people’s war against the virus and engage in ludicrous walkabouts through Beijing. Meanwhile, his functionaries stage the absurd (and unsafe) choreography of police literally sealing whole families inside their homes.
We’ve also seen the Chinese Communist Party take a direct page from the Soviet deflect-blame game.
Recall that Gorbachev spent most of his Chernobyl speech lambasting the West rather than taking responsibility. The West, he said, “needed a pretext by exploiting which they would try to defame the Soviet Union, its foreign policy, to lessen the impact of Soviet proposals on the termination of nuclear tests and on the elimination of nuclear weapons, and at the same time, to dampen the growing criticism of the U.S. conduct on the international scene and of its militaristic course.”
Compare this with the incessant editorials filling up Chinese state media pages. To believe them is to believe that the coronavirus is a valiant struggle between Xi and the “arrogance” and insults of the obstructionist West. The intention is the same as Gorbachev’s: to deflect blame and distract from the Chinese Communist Party’s persistent failure.
The shared truths of Chernobyl and coronavirus are clear. These are two terrible accidents, dramatically worsened by grotesque mismanagement and magnified by avoidable secondary injustices at the highest levels of the state. There are many lessons here, but the most important is an old one — Winston Churchill’s 1947 affirmation that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
